Instagram Publishing Flow.

Get the best out of Falcon's partnership with Instagram. Tell your story and directly post your single images through Falcon or use the Hub App to publish multiple images, stories and videos.

STEP-BY-STEP:PUBLISHING A SINGLE IMAGE POST THROUGH FALCON

1. Make sure you have added an Instagram account(s) under Channels. If you have not, read the following article on how to add a channel. If you already have an existing Instagram Channel connected in Falcon, you may need to refresh your Facebook Channel. If this is all set, you can continue with the following steps.

2. From Publish, click on 'Create a Post', then click on the Instagram logo, and select the Instagram account you would like to post to, if you have multiple accounts connected.

3. Start by typing a caption of your choice and adding your visual content. Note that all tagged Instagram accounts and hashtags in your caption will carry over when it is time to publish to Instagram.

4. The preview of your post will be visible on the right and you can switch between mobile view and desktop view.

5. You may either post the content right away by clicking Publish, or plan it for a later date within the Schedule drop-down.

6. Hit publish and you will be able to see your post directly on Instagram.

If you want to post multiple Images, Videos or Stories, this can be done through Falcon's Hub App. Falcon currently supports individual image and video posts (up to 60 seconds in length) and carousel posts (up to 10 images or 10 videos, or a combination of 10 images and videos).

1. From Publish, click on 'Create a Post', then click on the Instagram logo, and select the Instagram account you would like to post to, if you have multiple accounts connected.

2. Start by typing a caption of your choice and adding your visual content. Note that all tagged Instagram accounts and hashtags in your caption will carry over when it is time to publish to Instagram.

3. The preview of your post will be visible on the right and you can switch between mobile view and desktop view.

4. Select a user from your team who will publish the post natively on the Instagram app by clicking on Create New Publisher. Once you have added a Publisher, they will appear in the Select Publisher drop-down menu for future selection.

5. Follow the instructions in the pop-up window on how to add a new publisher and ensure that they install the Falcon Hub App (available for iOS and Android) and enable push notifications on their phones and within the Hub App.

6. Note that you may only select one Instagram channel per post.

7. You may either post the content right away by clicking Publish, or plan it for a later date within the Schedule drop-down.

8. If you clicked Publish then the Publisher will receive a push notification on their Hub app right away. If you clicked Schedule, then the Publisher will receive the push notification on the day and exact time for when you scheduled it.

9. Click on the push notification to be taken directly to the Hub app.

10. Click on the Publish button.

11. The multimedia attached to your post will automatically save on your phone's Camera Roll. At this time, the Hub app will also copy the caption attached to your post to your phone's clipboard.

12. Next, you will be taken to the Instagram app, where you will be able to select the multimedia to be posted.

13. From here, follow the usual Instagram flow to apply filters, paste the caption from your clipboard and do any other actions you would like, such as adding a location or tagging people in the image(s) or video(s).

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14. In Falcon you will see now that the Post has been send to the Hub App. In the Processing status you have an overview of the posts that were due to be published to Instagram and have not been manually marked as published and merged yet.

15. By clicking on any post from the list view, you will be taken to a page where you will have a summary on the post progress: Who created the post and when, who received the push notification on the Hub App and when, and whether or not it has been posted on Instagram.

16. In order to complete the last step in the progress - Select and merge the Instagram post - click on the Yes, It's Posted button.

17. You will see your published post from a selection of posts. Click on the corresponding post and click Merge & Finish.

Hot tip: Merging the Falcon post with the actual Instagram post will not only help you keep track of which posts have been published as planned, but also carry over all Notes, Labels, author and approver info to the published post.

If you do not want to merge the post instantly you can come back at a later point in time. Click on Publish and enter the Processing Tab, where you will have an overview of all unmerged posts. Simply merge your posts by clicking on them.

STEP-BY-STEP: CREATING A STORIES POST

1. From Publish, click on 'Create a Post', then click on the Instagram logo, and select the Instagram account you would like to post to, if you have multiple accounts connected.

2. Click on the "Story" tab in the editor window. You will notice that there is no text editor field because Stories does not support traditional captions.

3. Add multimedia for your Stories by clicking on the “+” button or by drag and dropping photos and/or videos into this section. Falcon supports individual photos and videos, as well as a combination of the two. Plus, you can create a sequence of up to 30 Stories for a more cohesive narrative.

4. Instagram verified badge pages and selected non-verified ones allow you to embed a URL of your choice in order to drive traffic to your website, campaign pages, other social media channels, etc. Note that you are able to add only one URL per sequence of Stories.

5. The mobile view preview of your Stories will be visible on the right.

6. The rest of the editor works the same way as it does for traditional Instagram posts (see steps 5 through 8 above).

7. The Hub app flow is the same for Stories (see section below) and once you are taken to the Instagram app, swipe up to access your camera roll. The multimedia you uploaded on the Falcon platform will appear in your camera roll.

8. Note that, even if you created a sequence of Stories in Falcon, you will have to publish each Story one by one by one.

9. If you have added a call-to-action URL to your Stories in Falcon, simply paste that URL from your phone’s clipboard.

10. Once your Stories are live, go back to the Falcon platform and click on the “Yes, It's Posted” button to complete the process.

We hope you will take full advantage of the Publishing Flow with Falcon to build better a Instagram marketing strategy for your brand. The moment a planned, created and published Instagram post is merged back to the Falcon Platform, you can fully manage that post directly from the Platform. Interact with your followers from Engage, build reports based on Labels, and very soon you will be able to post Stories as part of the publishing flow. Watch this space!

If you need further assistance you can reach out to us by submitting a ticket.